We’ve all been wondering when the axe will fall at our next large, box down the street or our huge insurance conglomerate buddy on the corner of downtown. But in the face of adversity we should be planning for the recovery.

Those lucky enough to be left in the daily fight to take on more responsibilities and keep their positions should be driving towards a better tomorrow. And the fight needs to be taken online.

By selecting specific traditional advertising and marketing initiatives and bringing them online first, rather than the sometimes much more costly process of doing them in print, you can create a better and more responsible budget that allows for you to stay nimble and keep the energy levels up.

How nimble you become is all about process and the understanding of how online media is supposed to take shape. A solid strategy that reaches a wider audience and the ability to reuse information are the most immediate benefits you get when you create the right online campaign.

Online retail circulars still have to be designed and published in PDF and then converted to a Flash-based preview. However, if you were to take the same media and design elements you use for the circular and place them into a reusable environment (database feeding to XML, CSS, xHTML, Flash), you have a much more efficient process and one that creates a better user experience.

Another way to increase revenue is to start a small mobile effort. For small businesses, it’s easier to capitalize on the mobile market since their product lines are usually smaller and can be changed easily to meet new needs.

For example: A small business offering ten products should think about slowly taking their product line online and allowing for mobile purchases. It’s not the most inexpensive idea on the road map, but it could turn out to have the most positive financial impact.

Rethinking our plans amidst a struggling economy is what separates the success from the failure. Prepare for the recovery, don’t wallow in the recession. Take the time and the measures you need to be successful and create the environment you want.

I am a dog person. I like dogs because they actually tend to fare better when given commands and they’re slightly much less manipulative than felines.

In my life right now I have a very odd relationship with my two PDAs. On the one hand, I have my dog. We’ll call him BlackBerry. On the other is my cat. Let’s call her iPhone. Sound ridiculous? Hardly.

Characteristics of my dog, BlackBerry

• Reliable (thank you, Verizon).
• Loud enough to tell me that something is happening, sometimes obnoxiously so to the chagrin of officemates.
• Can keep up with my hectic schedule and willing to go where I go (again, thank you, Verizon).
• Gives off the impression that it wants to be touched and managed.

Characteristics of my cat, iPhone

• Reliable when it wants to be…
• Can not stand to be touched when it’s not in the mood.
• Never available when someone calls it; not even the owner.
• Gives off the sleek impression of something sexy that wants to be touched only to leave user frustrated.
• Can’t handle the data I try to give it, then whines when it’s not being managed well.

With the launch of the iPhone 2.0 / 3G today, I hold hope that the iPhone, which is downright fun to have, becomes more reliable and able to handle the workload. It’s not the iPhone’s fault, mind you; they’re just made that way and they’ve been partnered up with a dog of a network. (Trouble from the get-go).

AT&T needs to understand that the 3G service will only go so far to tackle the true shortcomings of any device on their network. More bars in more places? Not anywhere I’ve been in the past 3 months. Most reliable network? That goes, hands down, to Verizon.

If I were able to whisper in the ear of one Mr. Jobs, my broken record approach would be to force AT&T to look into the coverage grid as a follow-up to their recently touted 3G upgrades.

Enhanced data speed is great (and sexy), but I just missed a call from my client.

C’mon, BlackBerry, let’s get to work.

iPhone? We can play later. If you’re in the mood.

It’s funny when we get into a debate with a client about their own audience. We often find out in these situations how much both sides don’t know about the customer.

In these cases, we lean on both the statistical data and the experience we’ve collected and take a shot at running tests to see how close we can get. We usually get pretty darned close.

But what happens if the client isn’t willing to disclose certain information or the audience is not allowed to see the new interface design until it goes out to beta?

Design to the user.

It’s at the point where I say this in my sleep. I design user experience. It’s based on the user and their experience. End of story. I don’t design applications or Web sites or software UI to meet the specifications of a machine or a database. That’s left to the capable hands of the back-end development team.

What I expect them to return to me is the data the USER needs in order to make the EXPERIENCE as painless as possible.

Our lives are filled with applications that spit out millions of data points and while a user’s interaction is much more savvy on the Web than it was ten years ago, it’s not so savvy as to correctly guess at what they’re supposed to do without some sort of roadmap.

It’s still ok to hold hands and it’s still ok to give them a map.

Keep the user experience useful.

It seems appropriate to head into the Thanksgiving holiday with a post about my gut.

That gasping for breath was just me trying to get out of the Numbers application for a moment. You see, the large marketing ROI spreadsheet that should have been developed, discussed, battered and presented should have been done so by a CPA or a CFO or a CFML or a QWERTY or some other string of letters has been sitting on my desktop for about three months. It’s been collecting dust because I don’t need to look at the spreadsheet to know how things are going with certain pieces of the business.

And herein lies the issue: When I speak to the Marketing person for one of our clients, the first thing they ask for is our “set of numbers”. I don’t and couldn’t give numbers for something we have yet to produce, but I can give you one thing: my gut. My gut is a far more talented thing that can be used to sense evil like some gastronomic superhero. It can tell me when I’ve got less than a minute to answer to a question in a sales situation because the person to whom I’m giving a pitch is less than interested because they mistakenly used that 31 minutes on their Friday calendar (at 4:30 PM) to schedule our meeting.

My gut is powerful, but sensitive.

My gut can tell the future of certain events in user experience. It can sense when we’ve got a designer who is going down the wrong path and needs to be reigned in a little. And, of course, it can tell me when I’ve spent far too much time trying to “prove” something is working when we have an increase of 25% in sales for a customer’s online shopping cart.

The data is necessary. I’m happy to provide it when necessary (you know, when the actual work is complete, not before it’s been performed). It’s there to give us a progress report. It’s there to validate our gut, but it is absolutely not, I’m happy to say, there to replace it.

Try something new.

Working on a project with a large financial data corporation over this past year has taught me that even when your entire business model is predicated on a half of a percentage point, the data is only part of the story. It’s the general human behavior and experience and proper training that can teach you right from wrong.

You may not always enjoy success, but you should feel confident that you’re at least trying something new. Go over the numbers if you must on every single piece of minutiae, but don’t let it stifle creativity. Don’t let it stop you from proposing exciting and different ideas.

Take on the challenge of proving your gut is just as strong as the numbers.

As you return from your too-quick break, remember that the numbers on the scale are really not more important that the feeling of your gut.